Brand journalism and PRs: playing a little better in 2017

Brand journalists are becoming more accepted by PRs although there remains a distinct split in levels of acceptance.

Today marks the publication of our third annual study of the UK PR community, run in partnership with ResponseSource.

Over 25 per cent of PRs believe mainstream acceptance of brand journalism has already taken place or will do so within 12 months.

Another 30 per cent believe it will take a little longer – between one to three years – before brand journalists are treated on a par with peers in traditional media organisations. Meanwhile, a third insist it will never happen.But when we group the first three answers and compare against the latter three – what we called progressives versus refuseniks in last year’s report – we find results that are between the 50/50 split of 2015 and the 60/40 in favour of progressives in 2016. However, this year’s result again errs on the side of the progressives.

Moving away from the statistics we found some of the most interesting insights in the conversations we had with PRs during the qualitative parts of the research. We found that PRs are quite savvy but accepting – they understand the equation.

They understand the writers and journalists are writing for other brands rather than traditional media organisations and accept this as long as the brand publication is a good place to have their client’s story heard.

As one respondent said: “It’s not the journalists that are treated differently, it’s the publications.”